A. Panda’s Bucket List

Next year, 2015, I will turn 50 years old. God willing. I’m not a big milestone guy, and I certainly don’t want any birthday party so everybody can celebrate how old I’ve become, as if just making it to half a century is some remarkable achievement. No, I’d rather look at some of the things I haven’t achieved yet and start knocking them out. Hence my bucket list.

I have been working on this for a few years, so I’ve accomplished some of the easier things:

Drank at a Swim-Up Bar, Montego Bay Jamaica, 2003

Met SHAG, NYC, 2007

Visited The Mai-Kai, Ft. Lauderdale FL, 2012

Met Bob and Leroy at Oceanic Arts, Whittier CA, 2013

So what’s next? Well, I’ve always wanted to attend The Hukilau, the world’s biggest Tiki geek event, so I put that on the calendar for this year. In fact, I’ll be there in a little over a month, and I plan to blog live from The Hukilau, so stay tuned for that. I hope to meet some of my other Tiki heroes in-person there, like Sven Kirsten, King Kukulele, Bamboo Ben, MeduSirena Marina, and Beachbum Berry.

Speaking of Beachbum Berry, he just announced that he’s finally opening his own Tiki bar in New Orleans this fall. This brings me to my next big item: Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Sounds like a good way to kick off 2015! Look for Jess and me at the Bienville House Hotel in the French Quarter next February, anchoring Bum’s new bar, Latitude 29.

For a big finish, I really want to see Hawaii. Not just one island, but all of them! Well, at least the big ones, so I can look for Pele in Hawaii, do the touristy stuff on Oahu, try surfing in Maui, and see the unspoiled beauty of Kauai. Jess and I have talked about doing this trip in June 2015, over my actual birthday. As long as we are physically, emotionally, and financially able to pull this off, you will see me posting from Hawaii next year. Book it, Dan-O!

I will close with a shout-out to Lesley Carter and her blog, Bucket List Publications. Lesley’s blog was the first one I started following after I started writing my own. I was so inspired by her mantra: “Some people make bucket lists to see places before they die; I make them so that I might truly live.” Wise words! Please take the time to check out this amazing blog. Mahalo, Lesley – perhaps our paths will actually cross some day!

Aloha Spirit: Sunset Beach

As I mentioned before, I believe karma introduced me to Tiki, and it continues to swim in my bloodstream. I’ve seen many signs in my travels that have confirmed this for me. Here is an example of what I’m talking about.

Montego Bay, Jamaica, June 2012. Jess and I eloped here 9 years earlier, and we decided to bring the whole family back for our second trip. I wasn’t sure how the kids would do at the Sunset Beach resort, which is family-friendly but has limited entertainment options compared to, say, Walt Disney World. I needn’t have worried – everybody had a great time! It turns out Sunset Beach had made some improvements in the 9 years since our first trip, the biggest of which was a new pirates’ castle with a dual water slide and a lazy river connecting to one of the swimming pools. Add this to the existing swim-up bars (one of my earliest bucket list cross-offs!) and you have fun for the whole family. The kids loved going up to the bars and ordering themselves (virgin) Strawberry Daiquiris, and Jess & I partook of many a (high-test) Strawberry Daiquiri and Piña Colada.

So what’s the Tiki connection? Well, I never really thought of any before, until I read a recent article by Jeff “Beachbum” Berry promoting his new book, Potions of The Caribbean. Mr. Berry is the world’s foremost expert on Tiki drinks, and he posits that all of the popular Tiki drinks made famous by Don The Beachcomber and Trader Vic in the 1940s-50s in California actually originated in the Caribbean, where rum was king going back to the days of Christopher Columbus. These early drink pioneers simply took recipes popular in, say, Cuba, dressed them up with tropical garnishes, gave them fancy Polynesian names, and voila: Tiki drinks. The most basic of these, Planters Punch, is a simple mixture of rum, lime juice and sugar syrup, and originated in…Jamaica!

But there’s more to this Jamaica-Tiki connection than just booze. During this trip, we were introduced to the Jamaican concept of Irie. I had gotten a sense of this spirit when we first came here to get married, whenever the locals working at the resort would say “no problem” or “ja mon” or just always be smiling, as if the abject poverty outside of the resort boundaries couldn’t get them down, when in fact they had every reason to be bitter about being a very poor nation, but regardless, the Jamaican people we interacted with seemed very happy.

So what is Irie, anyway? I found a few cool definitions:

1. adj powerful and pleasing;
2. adj excellent, highest;
3. noun the state of feeling great;
4. noun a state of peacefulness or harmony either with oneself or the world in general.

Wow, sound familiar? Irie and Aloha Spirit are physically worlds apart but spiritually quite close. Although I had never heard the term Irie when we first came to Jamaica, it was everywhere on this trip: t-shirts, posters, signs; some marketing genius must have decided Jamaica’s pleasing spirit needed a brand name! Wasn’t Bob Marley enough of a goodwill ambassador? He surely embodied the Irie spirit of Jamaica.

So, in retrospect, I feel there’s a strong connection between our choice to elope to Jamaica years ago, the joy of of our recent family vacation there, and the spirit of aloha I feel exploring Tiki culture. It was karma that we were introduced to Irie. Mahalo, people of Jamaica. Respect!